These courses are designed to provide the students with the essentials to becoming productive in Ruby and Ruby on Rails.  Whether you are system administrator looking to learn a new tool, a web developer wanting to know what this platform is all about, or you are a tester looking to learn about the tools you keep hearing about, these courses have something for you. 

Vital Ruby is a two day course that will bring you up to speed on the language, the environment and the tools that surround the Ruby language.  This course also provides a glimpse into the culture and community that is such an important ingredient to success.  Test-driven development is a natural part of what we do and will be reflected in this two day course.  

Vital Rails is a three day course that will leave you production-ready for building web applications.  We drive through the major components of Rails, while building an actual application that you will be able to take home and guide you as you develop the next killer app. Learn how to build, test and deploy a web application and all the pieces that go along with it.  Learn how to use plugins, how to use ActiveRecord as a stand alone ORM and see how to test your application in units or as a whole.  

• Jim Weirich has been active in the software development world for over twenty-five years, with experience that ranges from real-time data acquisition for jet engine testing to image processing and web services for the financial industry. Although Jim has experience in C++ and Java/J2EE technologies, his real passion is about delivering business value in a timely and efficient manner, and one of the best ways of doing just that is leveraging the power of Ruby and Rails. Jim is very active in the Ruby community and has contributed to several Ruby projects, including the Rake build system and the RubyGems package software.
• Joe O'Brien is a father, speaker, author and developer. Before helping found EdgeCase, LLC, Joe was a developer with ThoughtWorks and spent much of his time working with large J2EE and .NET systems for Fortune 500 companies. He has spent his career as a developer, project manager, and everything in between. Joe is a passionate member of the open source community. He co-founded the Columbus Ruby Brigade and helped organize the Chicago Area Ruby Users Group. His passions are Agile Development in the Enterprise, Ruby, and demonstrating to the Fortune 500 the elegance and power of this incredible language.  He has spoken at countless regional conferences, many national ones, such as RailsConf, RubyConf, MySqlConf, SDWest, internationally and hosts a conference on enterprise ruby, erubycon (erubycon.com). He has also trained many teams at organizations such as the LA Times and AT&T Interactive as a trainer with the Pragmatic Studio.
• Paul is an Agile/Extreme Programming coach and coder who has worked with many teams to improve their process and 'Agility'. He has been practising Test-Driven Development since 2000, and other Agile practices since 2002. He is an active member of the local Ruby and Agile communities, and co-organiser of the Scotland on Rails conference. Paul currently codes mostly in Ruby, and Objective-C, and Java but is open minded about other languages. He has spoken on topics such as organising a regional conference, working with resistance, and acceptance and test-driven development at events including European Rails Conference, The Naked Agilist Conference, and as a guest lecturer at Glasgow Caledonian and Napier Universities.